Rate Limiting Baiduspider Using nginx

The Baidu search engine has a voracious appetite for content and crawls one of my sites aggressively. It’s bad enough having to deal with load generated by bots from large technology companies with vast resources, but it’s another thing entirely when those bots crawl from dozens of IP addresses simultaneously and routinely browse thousands of […]

Video Encoding for the Web in 2016

Understanding the tools and technology related to video encoding is like trying to hit a moving target — every few years the scene changes entirely and you have to learn all the latest best practices over again. I recently spent more time than I should have preparing a video of some tanks rolling down the street near […]

Using systemd Timers to Renew Let’s Encrypt Certificates

This is a quick blog post to share the systemd timers that I use to automate the renewal of my Let’s Encrypt certificates. I prefer systemd timers to cron jobs for task scheduling because they are more flexible and easier to debug. I assume that you know what Let’s Encrypt is and that you already […]

Using Homebrew’s PostgreSQL on Mac OS X

You’re on Mac OS X and you need to use PostgreSQL, but you’re used to GNU/Linux where there is usually a dedicated postgres system user for doing database administrator tasks. This is just a quick note to people who might have installed PostgreSQL from Homebrew and find themselves scratching their head for the next step.

Microsoft’s New Privacy Statement Is Appalling

As Microsoft shifts their products into the “cloud” generation it seems they have decided that your data is their data. The recent release of Windows 10 has brought attention to their privacy statement which says: Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other […]